Johannesburg, 02 Sep 2004
Today, processes and systems can take months or years to re-engineer and many companies are grossly over-engineered. Sybille McCloghrie, director of Tilos, says business needs to move to a point where a process can be created in the morning for use that same day. This can be achieved by managing the knowledge embedded in all the people in an organisation to change processes dynamically depending on certain circumstances or factors.
Traditionally, workflow has relied on rigid processes. These processes are mapped out by consultants who do not consult every person in the organisation.
Many knowledge management and business process management systems are created from the top down. They do not gather information from all the people in an organisation, whereas the knowledge is in the heads of the people on the ground.
Business process re-engineering workshops are usually attended by a person at management level, or a consultant, not the person actually doing the work.
In most organisations, it is quite probable that 95% of the thousands of processes are not formalised. The only ones that are usually formalised are those that are high value, high risk or high volume. Processes that are too strict could be limiting.
In real life, documentation cannot keep up to date with how the business works, especially in terms of the creative, competitive stuff that will make the organisation a winner.
If an organisation has invested in an expensive and good knowledge management system, why do staff still resort to the "desperation location" measure, where they consult a long-standing member of staff to find an answer to their queries?
The solution to all of these problems is the creation of a system that can intuitively manage business processes by capturing the knowledge embedded in all people within an organisation and dynamically adapting the processes to changing circumstances. This is where business process management and knowledge management systems converge, the key to moving towards the real-time enterprise.
Such a system would dynamically figure out who to send work to and at what stage any particular process is. It would allow all the people in a process to alert others that work is coming their way or is ready to be completed. It would automatically generate an e-mail, SMS or Instant Messenger session to deal with queries from one person in a process to the person next in line.
The key is a "role definition" system, which would be run by the people involved in a particular process, such as a loan application, for example.
They would capture what roles they perform in the loan application - they would highlight what they do and what they need to do their job, but don`t necessarily capture themselves. They would also define who else in the organisation does the same work as them and if they are not available, who else could complete their tasks.
In the case of a loan application, the system could specify at what value or borderline score a loan needs to be approved by a manager. Questions or comments could be added, as well as details on the risks and limitations of the process.
By taking a few minutes to complete the wizard, the people`s expertise would be captured into the knowledge base, which would be used to drive work intelligently through the processes. Information is collected from the people who do the work, not management and consultants.
Once armed with such information, the workflow system would no longer need a formal process. It could continually evaluate tasks in a process, so that when certain conditions are met, the work is sent on to the next person in the process. If one person works faster than another, it could change the routing if another step in the process can be completed by another person in the meantime. It would dynamically re-engineer the process.
Organisations are typically disjointed from the front to the back office. A dynamic system such as this would merge the two, meeting the needs of the "immediate" world in which we live today. People don`t want to wait days for the results of an application. They want results at the time of application.
With this system, while the client side is still busy interacting with the customer, the back-end would already be fulfilling the application. Minutes after the application form has been completed, the whole organisation would have reacted to it and provided everything necessary to say whether or not the loan has been approved. Thus the company could truly move to the point of being a real-time enterprise.
In a "learning organisation", where knowledge is key and properly managed, the system could become clever enough intuitively to map what the best processes are for a particular time or circumstance. It would have enough knowledge to change these processes dynamically, depending on certain constraints.
If paradigms change, the wizard could be rerun at any time for any person and the system would dynamically adapt the process in the background. The system could route work intelligently in an attempt to satisfy the goals of the organisation, and capture the knowledge and experience in an organisation.
Share